Melinda and Rudy have made La Bloga proud. You should see a list of all 190 winners at this link.
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This bit of noir started off as a submission to a proposed Border Noir anthology. The project never finalized but I did finish my story. Crimespree Magazine recently accepted it for Issue 51. And now to the Land of Enchantment ...

When The Air Conditioner Quit

copyright Manuel Ramos - all rights reserved

When the air conditioner quit, Torres shot it. The bullet
bounced around the machine's innards like an insane pinball. "I don't have
time for this shit," he said.

Juanita rushed into the room. "Jesus! What the hell was
that?"

"Damn thing's broke. I put it out of its misery."
He laughed the horse laugh that she hated. Sweat already flowed down his back.

The gray dented machine sported an ugly hole in its side. It
hung crookedly in the window. A thin spiral of smoke rose from its louvered
vents.

"You dumb son-of-a-bitch. Now what're we gonna do?
It'll hit a hunnerd again today. You think of that before you pulled the
trigger?"

"I tole you it’s broke. Useless. You said it
yourself."

"I said it was goin' out. Big difference."

"Well, it went out. It stopped. Nothin' but hot air
comin' from it. Stinkin' up the place. You must’a smelled it."

"So you shot it? Are you crazy?"

He grinned at her and scratched the back of his ear with the
barrel of the gun. "You don't even have to ask, do you?"

She flipped him the bird then returned to the kitchen. At
least her fan moved the cooked air while she cleaned a pot of beans.

Torres tucked the gun in the waistband of his sweat pants and
covered it with his T-shirt. He needed a drink. “I’ll kill somebody if I stay
here,” he said to the stuffed owl.He
rubbed his hands through his hair. “I’m taking the pickup into town,” he
shouted. “I’ll be back for supper.” He looked in the direction of the kitchen.

She almost added that he should look for a job but the smell
from the air conditioner cautioned her and she bit her tongue. He did what he
could, she reasoned. What with the recession and all.

The pickup practically drove itself along the rutted dirt road for the five miles into Dexter. Torres hummed along to Hank Williams, Jr. “All my rowdy friends have settled down …”

He had money for a few drinks. Robbie Claxton, over in
Roswell, finally paid him for the briefcase of weed from Albuquerque. Took him
long enough. Juanita didn’t know he’d been paid but he’d work it out with her.
Tell her, “I’ll put somethin’ away for a new air conditioner, get that dog you
want, and then we’ll see what comes up.” The bulge of his wallet pressed
against his butt. The fake leather case carried nothing but the money.Five hundred dollars for a day’s worth of
work. Not even work. Driving, mostly. Watching for cops, staying cool, under
the radar. Picking up and delivering the package. Nothing to it. Life should
always be so easy.

He rubbed the American flag tattoo on his right bicep. For a hot minute he thought about making a run to the
border. In the old days, with five hundred bucks in his pocket, he would've
disappeared for a week. Easy to do in El Paso, Juárez. The things he’d seen, no
one believed. Some of it he wanted to forget.

He drove along quiet South Lincoln Avenue until he saw the
faded sign that years before blinked “Bar” and then “Café.” These days it stuck
on “Bar.” He stopped on the patch of soft asphalt that passed for a parking
lot.

The Hi-Way offered nothing more than beer, strong whiskey,
air conditioning, and a juke box with country and Tejano music. That was enough
for Torres and the four other customers.

“It’s like a ghost town out there,” he said to Cole the
bartender. “I didn’t see nobody.”

“Too damn hot," Cole said. "And there's no work.
It’s been so dead I’ve been thinkin’ of stayin’ closed until the weekend.”

Torres adjusted to the semi-darkness by squinting. He
ordered a shot of whiskey and a beer back. He chugged the shot, sipped the
beer. When he caught Cole’s eye he ordered another shot. The second shot lasted
longer than the first.

By the time three empty beers sat on the bar he’d forgotten
his promise to be home for dinner.

“Hey, Torres. How’s it hangin’?” Claxton’s younger brother
slapped him on the back. Torres flinched under the sting of the slap. Dickie
smelled like cigarettes and whiskey.

“Hey, Dickie. What you doin’ round here? I thought you was
away at school.”

Torres moved his
whiskey closer. Dickie was a big kid, like every Claxton. Had that wild red
hair they all carried. Quite a coincidence to run into Dickie Claxton. In the
Hi-Way, of all places.

“That’s for suckers. I got more important things to do, know
what I mean?”

“Yeah, sure. You here with Robbie?”

“Nah. On my own. Just checkin’ out the scene here in
beautiful downtown Dexter. These Dexter women are good ole country girls, you
know?”

“Yeah. I guess.” Torres didn't see one woman in the bar.

Dickie laughed. Torres tried to laugh but he choked on his
beer. He knew about the rape charge and getting tossed from New Mexico State.
Everyone knew. The paper made it front page news. No one brought it up, not to
Dickie or his brother, that was for sure.

Torres finished his beer. He decided to leave. He opened his
wallet to lay money on the bar.Dickie
grabbed his wrist.

“Hey, where you goin'? The party’s just started. You need to
catch up. I’m way ahead. Let me buy you a drink.”

Torres twisted his arm from Dickie’s grasp. “I gotta go.
Juanita’s waitin’. There's some work to do around the house.”

“Your shack, you mean? That place needs a lot of work, bud.
What could you possibly do that would fix it?”

“The air conditioner's been actin’ up.”

“You know about air conditioners? I thought you was a
roofer. What the hell you know about air conditioners?”

Dickie stepped away from the bar. He stood over Torres, at
least six inches. His eyes fixed on the wallet.

Torres shoved the wallet in his back pocket. The movement
lifted his shirt and Dickie saw the gun. Dickie shuffled back to the bar.

“But if you gotta go …” Dickie’s voice trailed off.

“Yeah. I gotta go. Maybe next time.”

“Whatever.” He turned to Torres. "Robbie paid you? I
was supposed to do that job for him, you know? But Robbie couldn’t wait. Your
good luck, eh?”

“Do what I have to. Need the work. Your brother will have
more for you. He always does.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Dickie stared down the neck of his beer
bottle.

Robbie was okay, a good guy really, but Dickie was over the
edge.

Torres walked out of the bar into the blazing sunshine. He
swayed from the booze and the heat. The daytime glare blinded him. He stopped
to get his bearings. Someone stood behind him. He tried to move out of the way.
A fist slammed into his kidney. Torres fell forward on the asphalt. The gun
slipped out of his pants.

“The wallet. Or I kick your face in.”

Torres struggled but Dickie’s boot dug into his throat. He
pulled the wallet from his pocket. Dickie snatched it. The younger Claxton
stepped back, hesitated, then punched Torres on the chin. He walked away, easy
and slow.

Torres rubbed his jaw, tasted blood. He picked up the gun,
aimed it at Dickie’s back. He flashed on the air conditioner.

Torres handed over the gun. Robbie held it like it was a
glass of water and he didn't want to spill a drop. He moved quickly after his
brother.

Torres sat on his haunches.

The Claxtons disappeared around the corner of the bar.
Torres heard shouting, a few grunts. He thought he should do something. The
empty street stretched away from the building.A white haze of summer light beat down on him.

He jerked his head when he heard the gunshot.A dog barked across the street. No one came
out of the bar.

Torres stood up. He leaned against his pickup, his hands in
his pockets, his mind locked down. Robbie stumbled into view. Blood oozed from
his chest. His bloody hand held the wallet.

“Take the goddam money and go home.” Claxton fell to his
knees. Blood quickly covered his shirt. Tires squealed from behind the
building. Torres ran into the bar and hollered for Cole to call 9-1-1.

He ran back outside followed by the bar's customers. He did
what he could but Robbie Claxton was dead when the ambulance screeched into the
parking lot.

The cops arrived at the same time. They ran around for a few
minutes before they settled into a routine. One cop crossed the street and
knocked on the door of a house. The cop in charge questioned the men from the
bar. He paid special attention to Torres.

“I had a drink," Torres told him. "When I was
getting into my truck Robbie come around the building, bleeding.” The cop took
notes as Torres talked. “He must’a been in a fight in the back. I didn’t see
anyone else. I tried to stop the bleeding but it didn’t do no good. Got blood
all over my hands." He showed his hands to the cop.

“You got some on your lip,” the cop said.

Torres rubbed his chin and lips with the back of his hand.

"I knowed this
guy since high school,” he said. The cop nodded.

Torres didn’t say anything about Dickie, nor that Dickie
drove a red F-150 with chrome wheels. How could he explain five hundred
dollars?

The ambulance men loaded the body on a stretcher and covered
it with a blanket. A dark red stain flared over the white cloth. The men lifted
the stretcher. Torres watched his wallet fall like a wounded bird dropping from
the sky. One of the ambulance guys picked it up and handed it to the cop. The
cop thumbed through it.

“This Claxton’s?”

“Don’t know," Torres said. "Didn’t see it before.
It was on him, right?”

“Under him. No money or I.D. Looks like he was robbed. I’ll
give it to his widow.”

An hour later the cop said Torres could leave. "I hope
you get the guy," Torres said.

He cleaned up the best he could in the bar's restroom. No
soap, only a few paper towels.

His pickup started right up and he sped through the streets.
He stomped the pedal when he swerved into the dirt road. The cab suffocated
him. He kept the windows up because of the dust. His hands sweated on the
steering wheel. Blood and sweat stained his T-shirt and pants.

He couldn't stop thinking about what happened between the
Claxton brothers. And his money. He thought so hard and deep that he didn’t see
the red truck until he was about a hundred yards from the house.

Then he saw Juanita hunched over in the doorway. She didn’t
look right.

End

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I've been busy talking about Desperado and crime fiction writing any chance I get. Here are links to a few recent interviews:

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Bobbi Salinas was an author and illustrator. I met her through her books in my classroom. My students loved her book "Los Tres Cochinitos, Nacho, Tito and Miguel." This is a great book about the three little pigs with the Latino style. Several years later, I met her in person in the Latino Writers Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico and I told her about the fantastic impact of her books in the classroom.This May, her dead body was found in Santa Fe, New Mexico. To read the news, visit http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/article_9aebdf12-2fb9-5be6-b8b2-29dad198ac66.html

Bobbi Salinas, descanse en pazToday at La Bloga, I want to present some of her books.

The Three Pigs: Nacho, Tito and Miguel

By Bobbi
Salinas

Spanish version by Amapola Franzen and Marcos
Guerrero

This retold,
non-violent version of The Three Pigs takes place in the Southwest.
Miguel, the

cleverest of the pigs, sees through the wolf's artificially sugared
tricks, and ultimately

A
bilingual, contemporary version of Cinderella by Charles Perrault, using Mexican-American
culture to tell a new story.

Indo Hispanic Folk Art
Traditions I

By Bobbi Salinas

A book of
culturally-based, year-round activities with an emphasis on Christmas. Designed
to promote awareness and understanding of this important holiday as it is
celebrated in Indo-Hispanic communities. Contains recipes, craft projects and
even ideas for creating and performing plays and costumes. Special deluxe
edition printed in Spanish and English

Indo Hispanic Folk Art
Traditions II /

Tradiciones Artesanales Indo-Hispanas II

By Bobbi Salinas

A book of culturally-based,
year-round activities with an emphasis on the Day of the Dead. Designed to
promote awareness and understanding of this important Indo-Hispanic holiday and
of the folk art that has characterized its celebration from antiquity to the
present. The Day of the Dead is a unique holiday that preserves and encourages
folk art and folklore as no other holiday does. Recreated annually in the
community, by the communit and for the community. Includes recipes, folk art
projects, costumes, theatre and dance. This special deluxe edition is printed
in Spanish and English.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Hannover: A Chicana’s PerceptionHannover, Germany May 12-19, 2013Note: Sarah R. Garcia is founder of Barrio Writers. She is on a European study program. This is part of her series of dispatches from the European front.

--Michael Sedano

If it weren’t for the cacophony of raspy verbiage and phonation of scrambled street names in the vast diversity in culture that quickly flashes before me, I could have confused the tram ride in Hanover Germany for one in New York or Los Angeles.

It was obvious that I left behind the soothing view of forestry and unobtrusive pallid foot-travelers in Switzerland and replaced the environment with sudden fleeting city scenes and various shades of razzing university students.

Upon passing the Königsworther Platz university exit, the sidewalks were crowded with scarves in one lane and bicycles in the other. The deafening low-high ambulances and the licorice aroma sifting through open-close rail doors redirected my attention at every new stop. My childlike curiosity had been bluntly awoken, forcing my senses to absorb the familiar and unfamiliar.

While the city train passed a few more exits, tall gray buildings and green patches sped before me like a dolly shot. Within a blink, images of China, Thailand and Australia flickered through my mind.

My first Hanover rail excursion had triggered nostalgia, reminding me of various travel endeavors in the past. Then just as I blinked again, I caught a quick glance of a sidewalk display of literature. A wooden cabinet with a glass door filled with books was sitting on the pavement amongst the pedestrians and cyclists.

Eagerly, I took the following exit, Herrenhäuser Markt, which also happens to be my daily stop for the next two weeks in Hannover. After retracing the path towards the public bookcase by foot, I soon found myself skimming German titles with my fingertips and inhaling the scent from the nearby Turkish cafe.

At first, I assumed the public bookcase was a form of activism in Germany, maybe a way to trump some sort of book ban, similar to Arizona House Bill 2281 in the states. But without being able to read German, I was left to my own thoughts.

While skimming through a clothed cover with black lettering, I envisioned Tony Diaz with Librotraficante shouting, “scheiße!” and furiously stocking the bookcases with Dagoberto Gilb, Sandra Cisneros, Howard Zinn and Paulo Freire throughout Hannover.

Chuckling out loud, I exchanged books from one shelf to the next, simply scrutinizing strange words and marked pages that made up second-hand books. Contemplation set in, if it’s not an act of revolt, then maybe a visual art piece by a local library? Naively, I hoped to discover the reason within the texts themselves.

Later that evening, after tasting the döner box (lamb, fries, tzaziki and cabbage salad in a to-go box) and sipping on the complimentary Turkish hot tea, I interviewed my German housemate about the bookcase only a short distance away. She casually dismissed my curiosity by stating, “You know, so people can exchange free books.” Later, other German students informed me of other bookcases around town.

During the following days, I waited for the trailing image of the public bookcase while on my way home from Uni. My peering grew into research, research turned into deeper contemplation. The origin of the public bookcase was inspired by the “Bookcrossing” concept, which is the system of leaving a book at a public place to simply be picked up by someone else, with the intent to eventually influence others to do the same.While riding the Stöcken 5 to Uni and back, my mind raced with ideas and comparisons. There have been many café’s and hostels in which I have picked up and left books because they too encourage building community through literacy. In Australia, I left a copy of Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country in a tree house hostel in Mission Beach and picked up Kafka’s Metamorphosis in The Forest (a communal home) in Brisbane.

One book sharing location I visit regularly is Calacas Café in Santa Ana, California. Their white, wooden crate is creatively marked to promote literacy and community support in the heart of my childhood city. Often, novels in English and Spanish are piled next to old college texts and favorite Chicano/a reads.

Such thoughts immerse daily, the weathered bookcase flashes by as a fragmented moment in time that not only transposes my traveler tales but also emits German history and humanity.

It is not difficult to contemplate the history of Germany when trotting over brick pathways that are embedded with brass plates honoring Holocaust victims. After encountering such reminders in the streets and discussing German history, Kafka and the Guttenberg press, the public bookcase across from the Herrenhäuser Markt train stop, found its way into my course at Leibniz Universität Hannover. Upon re-reading Metamorphosis as a class requirement in Germany, I found new meaning to one of his quotes. Franz Kafka once stated, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” Basically, books have an impact on our lives and sometimes they allow us to see ourselves from beneath the layers of disconnection.

Considering I am clearly across the Atlantic Ocean and closer to the North Sea at the moment, I find it ironic that I’m digging through foreign history only to realize that the U.S.A. is starting to mirror some of it. Take Arizona for example, by passing laws that alienate people and abolish ethnic studies, they have created the notion of keeping a “pure” race, only acknowledging the ideals of those in power, rather than the general population. It is quite disheartening to know the potential outcome of such governing. Scheiße, indeed.

As my thoughts continued to form later in the week, I returned to the public bookcase to capture its existence on camera, my German housemate joined me. I recounted that the public bookcases are maintained by volunteers, and mentioned their derivation, “Yeah, so the public bookcase actually originated in Hannover and Darmstadt in the 1990s as ‘free open air libraries.’ Since then, many other places around the world also started using them too. Cool huh?”

She had no knowledge of it until now. And that’s when it all hit me at once. Of course Germany was first to disseminate the public bookcase concept! Just like it was Gutenberg who invented the first printing press around 1450. It led to the printing revolution, eventually providing access to the bible, poetry and other types of literature to vast audiences in various languages.

It all seemed to resonate through a high-speed lens - from the tram window, to past travel memories and now onto my camera in front of my eye. All the images from the last week collected in shutter speed and stopped within a blink. Made me think of Kafka once again, who would’ve thought that the Hannover public bookcase that some just see as a blur from the rail, would be my axe to till through German history and rediscover my own life? Huh, in a way, these words are also a public display of exchangeable literature.

Mail bagAcademics: Afrofuturism Lensed Through Chicanafuturism

It seems ancient history, because it is. My friend and research partner, Sidney, was excited his friend Molefi Asante would be at the speech association conference in San Antonio. Molefi was bringing Sidney a copy of Molefi’s new book. Sidney’s excitement was contagious and I, too, wanted a look at a book called Afrocentricity. This struck me as serious stuff, a theoretical parallel to literature’s role in developing liberation epistemology.

Molefi was tardy. He missed the first day of the conference. The second day, he shows up with the promised book. Having spent the day prior partying in Laredo, he’s driven directly to the conference from la frontera. Covered in a garish sarape and wearing a fiesta sombrero, Molefi Asante hands over the promised copy of Afrocentricity.

That incongruous meeting with Asante was in the back of my mind the other day when a “Call for chapters for an anthology on Afrofuturism 2.0” arrived. Asante's landmark work stands among the progenitors of this line of scholarly inquiry.

Here are a few datos, from Reynaldo Anderson:

Afrofuturism, is a transnational, diasporic, and cultural aesthetic that interrogates the past, present and future in literature, technology, art, or music, and challenges Eurocentric motifs of identity, time and space. While this approach has grown in the past decade, there has been limited engagement with Afrofuturism’s relationship to the discipline of Africana studies, or Africology.

Anderson and his research partner are soliciting scholarly research, theoretical essays, and applied studies that explore how the concept of Afrofuturism is related to other futurisms such as Rastafuturism, Chicanafuturism, Occidental futurism or Techno-Orientalism.

For the US Army soldier serving on the world’s highest anti-aircraft missile site, Mae Bong mountain, thoughts of North Korea lurked just at the edge of awareness.

From the mile high mountain peak, North Korea lay somewhere out there, past one of those repetitious ranges of barren mountains stretching off to the horizon.

Our mission mirrored the name of our weapon: Homing All the Way Killer. The HAWK system is a big computer connected via a series of radars and umbilical cords to guided missile launchers. Mae Bong--Site 7/5 in signals lingo, Bravo Battery 7/5 its formal designation--perched at the mouth of MiG Alley.

An invading MiG could maneuver through valleys, around peaks, go high or fly low, finding easy targets on the ground or driving hell-bent to bomb Seoul a few minutes downrange. That’s why we’re up here on the mountain. Air defense artillery will be the first line of defense.

Sp/4 Sedano standing with microphone.

In an attack, battery control alerts the missile crewmen stationed out on the mountainside. The crewmen charge out of their cinderblock shelters, unwrap umbilical cables, open ports on the launchers, drag the heavy cable to the launcher, connect the fittings, then dash for cover behind nearby sandbags. On take-off, HAWK exhaust spews a column of thousand-degree fire into the launch area.

A pair of radars work in triangulation with the big radar. The Identification Friend-or-Foe radar makes sure that’s a bad guy, the Illuminator radar locks on to the hostile planes and sics missiles.

As supersonic jets dodge behind mountains, the BCC predicts emergence and points the Illuminator. The microsecond the target reappears, the Illuminator reacquires it as expected, all the while guiding the in-flight HAWK to the lethal interception point.

To reload, crewmen drive a tractor from a nearby stack of aluminum cans where missiles wait to be extracted, prepped, loaded, installed, and fired.

Once the hill runs out of missiles, our job atop Mae Bong was done. We’d either pick up our rifles and head toward the smoke, or hold on to that mountain.

That was the theory. What we laughed about during those hours huddled against the elements came from thoughts of tanks and screaming hordes of North Korean infantry filling the valley below us, waiting for us to come on down. The day we found a withered boot with an Australian soldier’s bones, it wasn’t so funny.

The DMZ on left, South Korea on right.

North Koreans remained an abstraction until the day I read a Special Services offer of a trip to Panmunjom and the Joint Security Area. The sign-up sheet filled early. Since everything about our year in Korea originates from this place, a year’s duty in this country wouldn’t be complete without a visit to where it all began.

The JSA is a tourist destination, neutral territory straddling the line between North Korea and South. But as GIs we weren’t tourists and were ordered to dress the part. Khaki was our summer uniform, but unlike duty days, today we were required to wear all our brass, medals, ribbons. Someone in charge somewhere decided we needed to look like strac troopers.

Briefly I recall Xenophon's soldiers sneaking up on the Persians for their first sight of the fearsome warriors. When the spies witness their baby-eating foe lounging around the campfire, combing their hair and preening in front of mirrors, the fear goes out of the Greeks. How will our first face-to-face meeting with North Koreans shape our perceptions?

The busload of GIs single filed into the central building, the room where negotiators brought hostilities to a close back in 1953. In the middle, a rectangular table holds the blue UN flag and the red star of North Korea. A cable laid across the table is the demarcation line, the MP explains. The line runs around the world, the 38th parallel, and from the Yellow Sea to the Sea of Japan it marks the dividing line between the two Koreas.

Sedano with "Bridge of No Return" and North Korea in background.

The touring GIs have taken fotos looking toward the “bridge of no return” and are walking the grounds of the place when the MPs begin to herd us back to the bus. The orientation lecture warned about provocation; sometimes “they” try to provoke us, so do whatever the MPs tell you and nothing else. “Get on the bus and don’t say a word, no matter what they say,” the MPs command.

“They” is two North Korean soldiers, an officer and an enlisted man. The soldiers walk around our group. The MPs position themselves between us and the two North Korean soldiers, herding us toward the bus, then onto it and into our seats. It’s time to leave.

The two soldiers walk around the bus to stand below our open bus windows. In unaccented speech, well modulated and unrushed, the EM says to his officer, “How about that. We scared the shit out of a whole busload of GIs.”

Six years later, not far from this foto, North Korean soldiers will axe murder two U.S. soldiers, Arthur Bonifas and Mark Barrett. I always wonder if these two guys were part of that attack.

They survived the coyotes
The Mexican drug cartels
They climbed the border fence
Walked across the Sonoran desert

To have a chance
To begin a new life
To make a home
In the land of opportunity

Now, dressed in their best
Oaxacan embroidered white
With a whisper of hope
He takes her hand

Exchanging a glance
They dart across the roadway
Hoping to go unnoticed
Their journey nearly over

Red Leather Heart (for my mama)by Iris De Anda

My fondest memory is her standing
in red leather knee length boots
they came to represent
her heart on fire
for each one of us
she had a certain look
and we were 5
the fiercest mujer
I've ever known
who loved him
like no one ever could
not even himself
when things changed fast
she held even faster to prayer
she had known this pain before
when leaving her country
plagued by war
she left a piece of her corazón
in the river of her mother &
her fathers' mountain
she followed her destiny north
like many have done before
she stands here still
weaving our lives with love
& warming our bellies with masa
her tears transformed into agua ardiente
that runs in my veins
I get all my goodness from her
my strong roots &
the dreaming of better days to come

Long Ago and Every Afterby Rose Valencia Sanchez

Opening up my heart,
but closing my eyes
I am a child again
You are gentle & patient,
trying in vain
to work a brush
through my wild
copper curly hair.

Drifting away,
A hazy, but still sweet memory
carrying me.
We are there,
Sitting on the front porch steps.
In the soft summer twilight you hear me,
(YOU ARE REALLY LISTENING!)
As I jabber and make no sense.
Even through approaching darkness
I see the love you feel for me
shining bright in your brown eyes.
Joy & Pride.

When I close my eyes
The taste of my favorite breakfast
On a dismal winter morning
Teases my taste buds
in memory
Scrambled, fluffy eggs
flanked by golden white bread
toast slices.
One slice with butter & Welches grape jelly,
One slice with butter only.
Hot, steamy cocoa
Sometimes with mini marshmallows.
Best of all,
savoring one last moment with you.

Before you had to send me off
to books, learning & school
Did I ever tell you?
All those day I just waited,
hurrying back home as soon as I could to you
away from all those strangers
imagined dangers.

Back to safe and secure
the way you helped me to feel
whenever I was with you.

My memories build
funny and sad times
that only my momma comprehends.
Even after we are both gone,
our bond will never end.

Momma,
do you remember the cat falling out the window,
Spaghetti dinners in box?
Or you sitting patiently on a bird pooped bench in the park
While daddy & I rode bikes or jogged?
I think I can even remember as far back
to the summer I learned to walk.
We ran barefoot just you and I,
Didn't we squish our toes in a teeny patch of green grass?
Watching hazy clouds drape themselves across a summer sky?

When I open my eyes
Your heart still beats for me.
When you close yours, do you remember when
You laid your hand upon your swollen belly
Wishing I would kick.
I responded to your voice
and your touch
inside you felt
the budding promise of your baby girl
and nothing but my love.

Dedicated to my momma Claudia Valencia
When anyone wants to know what kind of childhood I had,
please read this poem.
I love you momma.
I love you.

Segundo Memoriesby Nancy Lechuga

Fondly, I remember,

McDonald’s figurines lined up uniformly on windowsills,
a bright pink porch pointing out the boldest of Mexicans
a cholo on a bike balancing a pot of hot menudo on the handlebars,
blue coconut slushies after church on Sunday,
freshly made Mata’sProduce tortillas,
and over- the- hill Chicanos playing wallball
(I carry the hollow sound of their little blue balls
hitting the concrete walls in the wallet I carry
in my back pocket).

I remember locuras.

Playing hair salon and picking off the toritos from the neighbor’s bushes,
thin walls, and Cata la Loca’s moans penetrating my pillow head muffs,
aluminum can collections Friday morning with Grandma Antonia
and Blueford, the neighborhood bum, asking for a peseta.
(I gave him several of my domingos).

Yo recuerdo cucarachas.

A mural of the Virgen outside my door, and matachines
killing the roaches I sprayed with Raid, immortals that hid
behind the rings of my three ring binder and surprising
three seventh graders.
Jacobo laughed.
Lorenzo laughed.
Me? Appalled.
(Memories stick to me like roaches
behind the microwave timer screens,
they stick like a wad of bubblegum tape
on a seven year old’s hair,
just so daddy would cut it.)

I remember Cri Cri’s Caminito a la Escuela.

Anglo principals in Mexican schools,
summer programs from hell,
scary stories told in an Alamo Elementary’s school basement,
everyone’s personal encounter with La Llorona
and the less popular sister no one talks about.
(And in 1995, Lourdes the lunch lady announced Selena’s death,
screaming at the top of her lungs, startling
the third graders doing arm circles during P.E.).

I remember a time before Facebook.

Photographs of unknown family members forgotten
in shoe boxes, and my favorite picture of Tio Gordo’s
old baby blue Plymouth, windows rolled down,
and my dad and him smoking a joint.
(I placed that picture behind the clear plastic of my three ring binder.)

I remember teenagers entertaining
little cousins of various ages at Armijo Park,
Limon con sal for car sickness,
and Planned Parenthood Durex condoms
for backseat initiation.
(I still have a drawer full of old apartment keys
and old camera rolls my mom forgot to take to Walgreen’s,
I still have the agua bendita in a glass Coca Cola bottle
that my mom kept underneath the kitchen sink
to ward of bad spirits and to sprinkle on rebellious
teenage girls with hickie necklaces).

I remember the time before the neighbor ran off with my dad.

A line around Bowie Bakery for francesitos,
the place where my parents met,
and even though I wasn’t conceived
on the bread making table,
I’m a real panecito.

There is no one left in the house
except for me and the potatoes,
their skins cracked just enough
to let the steam rise from the pot
and hit my face.
Who ever thought of boiling potatoes in Arizona
in July?
The potatoes are like a sentence to me,
not a phrase of words, but jail time
where all I can do is remember things
I don't want to think about,
so I think about this:
If you boil the potatoes first,
their skins slip right off.

There are many such epiphanies to be had
making potato salad.
My family likes to use the red potatoes
maybe because my mom is an artist and
red skins are more aesthetically pleasing
than the paper bag brown.
I like them when you leave the skins on.
The steam curls around my face,
opening my nostrils,
beads of sweat form on my upper lip.
I touch the skins gently,
coaxing them off without digging.
I know that wasting food is bad since
somewhere there is a child with a bloated belly
who only gets one bowl of rice all day.

I prefer potatoes.

I like the feel of the warm crumbly bulbs
under my fingertips.
I am touching food,
something my mother can't do anymore.
Last year she stopped cooking.
She writhes in the bed
and moans in pain
and she screams bloody murder
when the only thing that is killing her is her mind.
It is so damned hard to not have a mother
when I can see her body right there
breathing in and out, when I can talk to her.
I want to ask her, Mommy, am I pretty? Am I good?
Will anyone ever love me
or will I always feel invisible?
She just says, I love you, honey,
but you don't come home anymore
and I worry about you. Where are you?
I want to ask her the same question.

She's right, I don't go home much anymore.
Instead I stay here at my second mom's house
alone with the naked potatoes,
and the hard boiled eggs in the sauce pan
that I've soaked with cold water
so I can touch them.
My second mom taught me that.

My second mom is no relation.
Isn't that funny?
I live with this family
that I consider my family
and I don't know how it happened,
how it came to me being a part of them,
but I think it was God who sent them to me
or me to them, not sure which,
probably me to them
like I was a lost puppy in need of a home.
But I am taller than all of them,
and I don't look like them much,
except for maybe the youngest son.
Is that why God picked them?
Don't know.

My second mom and them,
they went to the park for a picnic.
I'll go once I'm done cooking.
Before they left, I asked my second mom
what she wanted in the potato salad.
So many people put weird stuff in it
like mustard and pickle relish,
each family is different.
You can tell a lot about a family
from their potato salad.
That's why I had to ask her out of respect,
I couldn't assume anything.
She gave me my real mom's potato salad recipe,
exactly.
Maybe that's why God picked her
to take care of me
until my real mom
returns.

Gail Bornfield grew up on a small family farm in the rural Midwest. She is an educator in the public schools and a community volunteer. Her degrees are from the University of Iowa and the University of Arizona. She has also published short stories, essay, and poetry in The Tucson Weekly, The Oracle, The Hummingbird Review and La Bloga. Gail also has written a children’s chapter book.

Rose Valencia Sanchez was born to Santos and Claudia Valencia in East Los Angele's California. Rose developed a love for words and reading at a young age, due to playing word games, and reading together with her family. She also enjoyed listening to the many stories of her fathers childhood in New Mexico. He painted such a vivid picture with his words, that Rose aspired to do the same.

Rose currently resides Arizona, and is fighting against racial intolerance and injustice aimed at the people she was always taught to be so proud of. The first thing you see when you walk up to Rose's front door is a sign on her front window that states "NO SB1070." She carries this statement inside her heart, and it fills up her every waking moment. She is fighting this war her words, her weapons is drawn, she is ready to battle.

Nancy Lechuga is an El Paso poet and educator. She conducts writing workshops in her community and is currently at work on her first book of poems.

Andrea García Mauk grew up in Arizona, where both the immense beauty and harsh realities of living in the desert shaped her artistic soul. She calls Los Angeles home, but has also lived in Chicago, New York and Boston. She has worked in the music industry, and on various film and television productions. She writes short fiction, poetry, original screenplays and adaptations, and is currently finishing two novels. Her writing and artwork has been published and viewed in a variety of places such as on The Late, Late Show with Tom Snyder; The Journal of School Psychologists and Victorian Homes Magazine. Both her poetry and artwork have won awards. Several of her poems and a memoir are included in the 2011 anthology, Our Spirit, Our Reality, and her poetry is featured in the 2012 Mujeres de Maiz “‘Zine.” She is a regular contributor to Poets responding to SB 1070. Her poems have been chosen for publication on La Bloga’s Tuesday Floricanto numerous times. She is also a moderator of Diving Deeper, an online workshop for writers, and has written extensively about music, especially jazz, while working in the entertainment industry. Her production company, Dancing Horse Media Group, is currently in pre-production of her independent film, “Beautiful Dreamer,” based on her original screenplay and manuscript, and along with her partners, is producing a unique cookbook that blends healthful recipes with poetry and prose from the community.

Monday, May 27, 2013

Luivette Resto was born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico, but
proudly raised in the Bronx. In 2003, she completed her M.F.A. from the
University of Massachu­setts at Amherst. Her first book of poetry, Unfinished
Portrait, was published in 2008 by Tia Chucha Press and later named a
finalist for the 2009 Paterson Poetry Prize. She is also a contributing poetry
editor for Kweli Journal, a
CantoMundo fellow, and the hostess of a monthly poetry reading series called La
Palabra at Avenue 50 Studio in Los Angeles.

Resto’s latest book of poetry is Ascension
(Tia Chucha Press). As the publisher describes
this new collection: “Ascension explores the delicacy and the fragility of all
re­lationships; not just the romantic ones in nature, but the ones we have with
our family, friends, community, city, politics, nature, history, and ourselves.
Some poems focus on the complexity, nascency, and dissolution of these re­lationships
while other verses are unapologetic with their celebration of the self.”

PRAISE FOR ASCENSION:

“In Luivette
Resto’s Ascension, our speaker is an
unflinching witness and an exposed nerve. ‘Slut, murderer, mother,’ she carries
betrayal, heartbreak, and hope. She mines the everyday, the ‘pedestrian or
exquisite,’ for all its possibility. In paean, in dirge, in sonnet, she invokes
Wonder Woman, and Puerto Rican Obituary. Without hesitation, she calls out
misogynist colleagues, two-timing lovers. Personal and political, these are
poems of defiance, affirmation, material and spiritual survival.” —Barbara Jane Reyes, author of Poeta en San Francisco and Diwata

“This collection is full of fierce and tender poems. I love
their clarity, their unpretentiousness, their courage, the respect given to
people and situations by detailed seeing and saying. I love the poems’
lyricism, in both languages, not afraid to put the beat and heat of Spanish
into English or the cool ironies and savvy of the Anglo-Saxon voice into
Spanish. I love how the poems give voice to outrage but without singeing the
world with bitterness or ideology or rhetoric. How they celebrate our culture
and champion its hybrid manifestations instead of the simple and seductive
either-ors.” —Julia Alvarez, author of The
Woman I Kept To Myself and Homecoming

Amelia Montes: Where does Every Broken Trust take
us? Should we have read the first novel Every Last Secretor can the
reader read this one and then go back to the first?

Linda Rodriguez: You can read Every Broken Trust even if you haven't read Every Last Secret before it. They are a series, but I've tried to make each book work as a stand-alone novel, as well. Every Broken Trust takes place in Brewster, MO, right outside Kansas City and into Kansas City itself in terms of physical terrain. In other ways, this book explores various kinds of betrayal and the effects betrayal can have on normally nice, sane people.

Linda's first book, winner of the Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition

Amelia Montes: How was the writing of Every Broken Trust different from writing Every Last Secret?

Linda Rodriguez: One difference was that Every
Broken Trust was written under contract with a deadline. Every Last Secret was written with no
assurance that anyone would ever want it, but with the freedom to take as long
as I wanted and with no time pressures since it was written on spec. When I
first sat down to write Every Broken
Trust, I panicked. Could I write a good novel, preferably even better than
the previous one, on a schedule? I emailed a good friend who’s a NYT
bestselling novelist—“Help! I’m not sure I can do this! How do you manage
it?”—but got no answer since she was out of her office. So I told myself that I
knew how books were written: by planting the butt in the chair and just doing
the work. By the time the workday was over, and I heard back from my friend, I
had several scenes written and didn’t need her to hold my hand, after all.
“Just do the work” has become my mantra.

Amelia Montes: Was your process different?

Linda Rodriguez: I tried to use an outline, as always. I’ve come to realize
that I need that outline to get me past the intimidation of the blank
page.But I know now that I won’t
really follow it. I’m congenitally incapable of following a pattern or instructions.
I guess I have a problem with authority, even my own. At about halfway through
the manuscript, I realized that the murderers I had planned on wouldn’t work
because everyone would know it was them right from the start—it would be
obvious. My husband came home to find me stalking through the house, hands
flailing and crying, “It’s all wrong. What will I do?” I did what I always do
with my writing when there’s a problem. I went back to character and started
digging deeper into some of the lesser characters to see how I could make them
better suspects. I found my murderer there and made a much stronger book in the
process.

Amelia Montes: How much research went into the writing of Every Broken Trust?

Linda Rodriguez: I did research about the storage caves, a common thing in
the Kansas City area. There’s a local college that has a setup very close to
what I’ve given Chouteau University in terms of the caves. I did research into
the immigration and refugee situation in Kansas City.Kansas City is the Ellis Island of the Midwest. As well,
with human trafficking—Kansas City has the first federal human trafficking task
force that’s a pilot for the whole country, run out of the U.S. Attorney’s
office. And I did research on the families of Chilean shepherds who have run
the sheep and goat ranches of the western states for many generations, most
kept in much worse conditions than Ignacio endures on Karen’s farm.

Amelia Montes: Do you feel much more confident now, after having written two novels?

Linda Rodriguez: I think I would, except each novel sets a new writing
problem, so each time it feels like starting from scratch again. I think that,
as we move along and become more experienced, we expect more from ourselves and
take on more ambitious projects. At least, I know that’s how my mind works. But
at least I am more confident that I will be able to finish what I begin.

Amelia Montes: How well did your first book do and how do you plan to help sell Every Broken Trust differently or will
you use the same strategies? (I guess this is a question about the
"business" and best ways to sell one's work)

Linda Rodriguez:Every Last Secret did quite well for a first book. My publisher is happy with
the sales, and though the final data is very slow to come in, it looks as if I’ll
earn out my advance which was larger than usual for a first book because it was
a prizewinner. (And I would urge any writers out in “La Bloga’s” audience to
submit to one of the four free St. Martin’s Press book contests if you have an
idea for a crime novel. They have no entry fee and each offers publication and
a $10,000 advance. More info here: (click here)

Among the different strategies I hope to try in promoting Every Broken Trust is a book tour
through Texas. Texas is the largest market for mystery novels in the country,
and I have many good friends in Texas.I hope to hit Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio for a
week in September. Texas is also where the great organization Las Comadres started, and in September, Every Broken Trust will be a part of the
Las Comadres National Latino Book Club.

Amelia Montes: Is there a third installment coming?

Linda Rodriguez: My agent is knocking out the final contract details on the
third Skeet book, which will be called Every
Hidden Fear, right now. So look for that next spring.

Amelia Montes: Are you planning Skeet to be a recurring character in this mystery
series? I am calling it a mystery series--is that okay? I guess
that connects to my earlier question on whether there will be more.

Linda Rodriguez: Yes, Skeet will continue to be the protagonist of these
books. Some of the important secondary characters, such as Karen, Ignacio, Gil
and Dolores, and others will take center stage as part of the mystery and main
story of one book or another, though, as Karen and Ignacio do in this book. I
see them as a repertory cast of characters. But the whole series is a
meta-novel about Skeet’s development as a person.

Amelia Montes: What does Skeet learn about herself in this new novel
that she didn't learn in the first?

Linda Rodriguez: One of the hardest lessons Skeet has to learn in this book
is forgiveness. She also has to confront the clay feet of people she set up as
role models and parents of choice and learn how to continue loving and valuing
people who’ve fallen short of her ideals. This book also pushes Skeet further
down the road toward integration into her life of her heritage and toward some
sort of relationship with her estranged family. And in this book, Skeet must
become a real nurturer of others, a role she’s always run from before.

Author, Linda Rodriguez

Amelia Montes: Now that you've written two novels, what is your experience with the
book business? What advice can you give to a beginning writer who is
ready to market a book?

Linda Rodriguez: First of all, I’ve learned that publishing is ver-r-r-r-ry
slow. Patience isn’t a virtue but a necessity.

Secondly, if you have written a novel and want to publish
it, it’s probably not ready yet unless you’ve done an awful lot of re-visioning
and rewriting, and you don’t want to submit what isn’t the best work you can
do. Publishing, even at the top levels, is actually like a small town. Editors
know each other and move from house to house. You don’t want to develop a
reputation as someone who sends out half-baked work. So, make it your absolute
best to begin with.

Next, learn about the business of publishing. Like any other
profession or industry, it has its own ways of doing things. Learn how things
are and are not done. Don’t get a reputation as a fool or a boor simply because
you haven’t bothered to learn how things work. Join a national professional
writers’ organization—it almost doesn’t matter which. If you write mysteries
and none of the mystery organizations are near, but you have a local branch of
RWA, the romance writers national, don’t turn up your nose: (click here). Any of the national
writers’ organizations will teach you a lot about the business of
publishing—Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, Romance Writers of
America, Science Fiction Writers of America, the Society for Children’s Book
Writers and Illustrators, and others—and that’s what you need to learn.

I wrote a whole blog post about first steps to take for
publishing your book with more information and you can find it here: (click here).

Amelia Montes: You are a member of The Kansas
City Latino Writers Collective. Tell us a little bit about that group
and how that group has helped your work.

Linda Rodriguez: The Latino Writers Collective is an organization very dear
to my heart. It’s based in Kansas City, Missouri, but also has members in other
cities and states. The Collective supports Latino writers and the Latino
community with critique sessions, workshops, readings and events, publications,
and collaborations with other community organizations. I was vice president for
six years. Now I’m no longer on the board, but I am still a member.

The Latino Writers Collective was very important to my work.
I already had a master’s in creative writing, but it was while working with the
Collective that I was encouraged to work with the Latino and Native American
material of my life. I had always been discouraged from this by my professors
(who meant well and were creatures of their time). I had already been published
quite a bit before the Collective formed, but I feel that my fellow LWC members
were a huge help as I began to do my best work. LWC is mi familia, and I always acknowledge them in my books.

I strongly urge aspiring writers to find some similar
supportive group, one that won’t tell them (as I had been before LWC) “don’t
write about that—it’s not universal.” Who decided that only the privileged white
cis-gendered male take on life was universal anyway? I hope you can find a
group of writers who are as supportive and great as LWC has been for me and
many other writers. Macondo is another similar group on a more national level,
as is Canto Mundo. I think these organizations where we band together with
people of similar backgrounds and situations—and aspirations!—can be
life-changing for us as writers.

Amelia Montes: How would you define "the mystery genre"? Are
there different genres within "the mystery" bookshelf? How
would you define your books within this book world of mysteries?

Linda Rodriguez: Right now, crime fiction tends to cover a wide spectrum from
the coziest of cozies to the darkest of violent serial killer novels. The basic
categories within the genre are the traditional mystery (of which the cozy is
just one part), suspense (with its sub-category, romantic suspense), noir and
hard-boiled (once two distinct categories that have come to blend into each
other), urban fantasy (which blends aspects of hardboiled and horror or
fantasy), and thriller (with its subcategories of psychological, adventure,
espionage and spy, techno, and serial killer). And of course, people are
blending these categories and genres fast and furiously to make even more.The big division is between mystery and
suspense. In mystery, the reader is learning what happened and why along with
the protagonist while, in suspense, the reader may know who the evildoer is or
certainly what’s being planned, although the protagonist doesn’t. But even those
lines blend today. My books are traditional mysteries until near the end where
they veer into suspense once the reader and Skeet learn who has committed the
crimes but s/he has yet to be caught and stopped.

Amelia Montes: What else would you like to tell our "La Bloga"
readers about . . .

Linda Rodriguez: I would like to urge "La Bloga" readers to support the writers
they love to read by requesting and checking them out from the library, buying
them from bookstores and online, and telling people about them through word of
mouth recommendations, reviews on online sites or blogs, and formal critical
reviews and essays. Latino, Native American, African American, Asian American,
LGBTQIA, and other writers who don’t fit that “universal” privileged model I
mentioned earlier are often published by smaller presses which can’t get the
review coverage the Big Six can. These writers are reviewed less and thus are
less likely to be in libraries and bookstores because people are not aware that
they exist. Some of us have been lucky enough to publish with large publishers,
but the majority of books coming from these writers are from the small presses,
those heroes in the trenches of literature. Do whatever you can to see that
others out there in the world have the chance to learn about the writers you
love. That way, it’s much more likely that you’ll see more of their works and
writers like them offered to the public.

Amelia Montes: Thank you so much for taking the time to be with "La Bloga" this Sunday.

Linda Rodriguez Bio:

Linda Rodriguez’s second Skeet Bannion novel, Every Broken Trust (St. Martin’s
Press/Minotaur Books), is available for sale now and was selected by Las
Comadres National Latino Book Club. Her first Skeet novel, Every Last Secret, won the Malice Domestic Best First Traditional
Mystery Novel Competition, was a Barnes & Noble mystery pick, and is a
finalist for the International Latino Book Award. For her books of poetry, Skin Hunger (Scapegoat Press) and Heart’s Migration (Tia Chucha Press),
Rodriguez has received many awards and fellowships. She is the president of the
Borders Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, a founding board member of Latino
Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of the Macondo
Community, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, Kansas
City Cherokee Community, and International Thriller
Writers. She was formerly director of the University of Missouri-Kansas City
Women’s Center. She spends too much time on Twitter as @rodriguez_linda and on
Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/LindaRodriguezWrites.She blogs
about writers, writing, and the absurdities of everyday life at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com.